And the Student Book Collecting Award winner is...

Apr 12, 2012 7:16 AM

Congratulations to Robert "Rob" Patrick Smith, a master of library science student in the School of Library and
Information Science, who is the 2012 winner of the Thomas Cooper Library Student
Book Collecting Contest. He will receive
the first-prize award of $250 at the Thomas Cooper Society’s Annual General
Meeting and Banquet on April 20.

An avid bibliophile with more than
3,000 volumes in his personal library, Smith won the award for his
“Historical Radio Book Collection.” That collection, comprised of more than 60
books, includes handbooks for early radio experimenters, how-to manuals for
vintage radio enthusiasts, texts for classroom use, training aids for the war
effort, and detailed service manuals. The oldest book in the collection is An Elementary Manual of Radiotelegraphy and
Radiotelephony for Students and Operators, published in London in 1908.

Smith began his collection some 30
years ago when, as a teenager, he purchased an old radio and related books at a
neighborhood garage sale.

“In these books
were diagrams and photographs of the technology of the past, yet to my
fifteen-year-old eyes they were illustrations of works of art and things of
beauty,” he wrote in his contest essay. “It was these first few books that
began a lifelong hunt and collection of all things related to vintage radios.

“The technology
that these books highlight is, in fact, the foundation of today’s semiconductor
driven electronics,” he wrote. “In fact, the term ‘semiconductor’ is a
reference to two vintage radio components. . .These radio books from the past
form a link for me to the technology of this bygone era.”

In addition to the essay, Smith
submitted a detailed list of each book in his collection.

“Robert Smith's
collection of early radio books alone is impressive,” said Jeffrey Makala,
Outreach Librarian for the Hollings Special Collections Library and coordinator
of the Student Book Collecting Award. “But
the selection committee was especially impressed with the care and thought he
put into annotating his bibliography to show the significance of each book and
the ways in which a larger history of books on radio can be constructed from
the collection.”

The results of Smith’s
work will be on display in Thomas Cooper Library during the month of May, where
visitors will be able to view a selection from his collection and read his
exhibition text.
His winning entry also will be submitted to the National Collegiate Book
Collecting Contest, co-sponsored by the Library of Congress, the Antiquarian
Booksellers Association of America, and the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic
Societies. The University's 2007 winner was a runner-up in the national
contest.

The Thomas Cooper Library
Student Book Collecting Contest was created to foster student interest in
establishing and building personal book collections. The University's libraries
have many of the world's top literary research collections, including ones on
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Milton and Robert Burns. The award,
sponsored by Thomas Cooper Library, was begun in 1993 by the Thomas Cooper
Society to encourage beginning book collectors.

Collections entered into the
competition may be in any field or may emphasize some particular area of
interest within a subject. Collections may illustrate a certain bibliographical
feature such as edition, illustration, typography and binding. Books and
printed documents in all formats are acceptable for submission. Materials
submitted by entrants must be owned and have been collected primarily by them.
To enter, students must submit a brief essay describing how and why the
collection was assembled, including plans for future growth and development,
and an annotated bibliography of selected titles from the collection.